Had Achebe not overdosed on Igbo nationalism, he would have had his chest-beating ethnic bombasts inflected with a deeper and more sober analysis of the Nigerian situation in the next essay in the journal: The Inevitability of Instability by a real and existing Professor James O’Connell, an Irish priest and professor of Government, in a real and existing institution: Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. O’Connell argues that the lack of constitutionalism and disregard for rule of law fuelled psychology of insecurities in all ethnic groups. He fingers as an inevitable cause of our national instability, Nigerians’ “failure to find an identity and loyalty beyond their primordial communities that lead them constantly to choose their fellow workers, political and administrative, from the same community, ignoring considerations of merit.”
The symbolism of the Igbo heading University of Ibadan and University of Lagos, both in Yorubaland, was a positive image to assist Tiv, Hausa, Ijaw, Urhobo, Yoruba, Ibibio, Igbo, Efik etc students shed their over-loyalty to their respective primordial communities and to fashion a higher sense of identity that is national in character and federal in outlook. To Achebe, the symbolism was an example of the dominance and superiority of the Igbo. “It would appear that the God of Africa has created the Ibo nation to lead the children of Africa from the bondage of ages,” Paul Anber quotes Azikiwe saying in his West African Pilot: “History has enabled them not only to conquer others but also to adapt themselves to the role of preserver… The Ibo nation cannot shirk its responsibility.” Anber says in his/their essay: “The Ibo reaction to the British was not typically one of complete rejection and resistance, though Ibos were militantly anti-colonial. Since modernisation is in many respects basically a process of imitation, the Ibos modelled themselves after their masters, seeing, as Simon Ottenberg put it, that ‘the task was not merely to control the British influence but to capture it.’

To some degree, it may be said that this is precisely what they proceeded to do. Faced with internal problems of land, hunger, impoverished soil, and population pressure, the Igbo migrated in large numbers to urban areas, both in their own region and in the North and West…”
The spirit of inclusive humanism, the Martin Luther King Ideal, the Mandela Example, the conscience of a writer should necessitate that if a child in Sokoto goes to bed hungry, someone in Umuahia should get angry. If a pregnant woman in Kontagora needs justice, someone in Patani should be able to stand up and fight for her. If an Osu group is being maltreated in Igboland, someone in Zaria should stand up and defend them. But to Achebe, there should be no mercy for the weak in so far as he or she is unfortunate enough to belong to the other side. Take for instance the butchering of the lone shell-shocked “Mali-Chad mercenary” wandering around “dazed and aimless” in the bush Achebe witnessed. To show the fight-to-finish courage of his people in the face of overwhelming force, he describes how Major Jonathan Uchendu’s Abagana Ambush succeeded in destroying Colonel Murtala Muhammed’s convoy of 96 vehicles, four armoured vehicles, killing 500 Nigerians in one and a half hours. “There were widespread reports of atrocities perpetrated by angry Igbo villagers, who captured wandering soldiers. I was an eyewitness to one such angry bloody frenzy of retaliation after a particularly tall and lanky soldier–clearly a mercenary from Chad or Mali–wandered into an ambush of young men with machetes. His lifeless body was found mutilated on the roadside in a matter of seconds (pg 173).”

Achebe does not tell us if he tried to prevent this cold-blooded butchering, though there was an episode where he intervened to save the life and chastity of a Biafran woman, arguing with some wandering Nigerian soldiers who wanted to requisition her goat for food (pg 201). If Achebe could not intervene in the butchering, what did he think of the killing then or now that he is writing the book with the benefit of hindsight? Should the man not have been handed over as a prisoner of war? Was his killing not a violation of Geneva Convention, which he so much accused the Nigerian side of disrespecting (pg 212)? Did villagers behaving this way not blur the lines between soldiers and civilians hence making themselves fair game in war? Also notice how Achebe starts the narration with an active first person voice: “I was an eye witness to…” and how he quickly switches to a passive third person voice in the next sentence: “His body was found…”Achebe quickly goes AWOL “in a matter of seconds”, leaving a moral vacuum for the Igbo writer to emerge and the conscientious writer to go under.
When atrocities are being committed against Biafrans, Achebe deploys strong active voice (subject + verb), isolates the aggressive phrases of military bravado with italics or quotation marks. But when Biafra is caught committing the atrocity, he employs passive sentence structures, euphemisms and never isolates pledges of murder in italics or quotation marks. Take the “Kwale Incident (pg 218)” that eventually became an international embarrassment for Biafra. Based on an unsubstantiated source, he writes: “Biafran military intelligence allegedly obtained information that foreign oilmen…were allegedly providing sensitive military information to federal forces – about Biafran troop positions, strategic military manoeuvres, and training.” So they decided to invade. “At the end of the ‘exercise’,” Achebe writes: “Eleven workers had been killed.”

Also compare these two accounts: the background is Biafran invasion of Midwest. Despite Ojukwu’s assurance to them before the secession that he would absolutely respect their choice of belonging to neither side, he invaded them, occupied their land, foisted his government on them, took charge of their resources, looted the Central Bank of Nigeria in Benin, set up military checkpoints in many places to regulate the flow of goods and human beings, imposed dawn-to-dusk curfews, flooded the airwaves with pro-Ojukwu propaganda, imprisoned and executed dissidents on a daily basis, according to accounts of Nowa Omoigui and the recollections of Sam Ogbemudia. In fact, “The Hausa community in the Lagos Street area of Benin and other parts of the state were targeted for particularly savage treatment, in part a reprisal for the pogroms of 1966, but also out of security concerns that they would naturally harbour sympathies for the regime in Lagos,” Omoigui writes. The Midwesterners regarded Biafrans as traitors. And the Nigerian Army came to the rescue.

Achebe writes: “The retreating Biafran forces, according to several accounts, allegedly beat up a number of Midwesterners, who they believed had served as saboteurs. Nigerian radio reports claimed that the Biafrans shot a number of innocent civilians, as they fled the advancing federal forces. As disturbing as these allegations are, I have found no credible corroboration of them (pg 133).” Yes, he cannot find it; they were not his people. Also note his euphemisms: “allegedly beat up”… “shot a number of innocent civilians” (shot not killed). He writes: “a number of innocents” to disguise the fact that massacres took place. He also writes: “saboteurs.” Midwesterners collaborated with federal forces to liberate their lands from Biafra, Achebe calls them “saboteurs.” Now, note in the next paragraph how he describes what happened to his people, when the federal army in hot pursuit of the Biafran soldiers, reached the Igbo side of the Midwest. It is noisily headlined: The Asaba Massacre (pg 133).
“Armed with direct orders to retake the occupied areas at all costs, this division rounded up and shot as many defenceless Igbo men as they could find. Some reports place the death toll at five hundred, others as high as one thousand. The Asaba Massacre, as it would be known, was only one of many such post-pogrom atrocities committed by Nigerian soldiers during the war. It became particular abomination for Asaba residents, as many of those killed were titled Igbo chiefs and common folk alike, and their bodies were disposed of with reckless abandon in mass graves, without regard to the wishes of the families of the victims or the town’s ancient traditions.” Then he goes on to quote lengthily from books and what the Pope’s emissary said about it in a French newspaper, what Gowon said, what was said at Oputa Panel e.t.c. He found time to research. They were his people unlike other Midwestern tribes’ sufferings he could not find “credible corroboration of.”

Massacre In The East
In the chapter, The Calabar Massacre, Achebe not only totally blanks out the well-documented atrocities, including massacres Biafran forces committed against the Efiks, Ibibios, Ikwerre, when they occupied their lands and when they were retreating in the face of federal onslaught. Achebe writes: “By the time the Nigerians were done they had shot at least 1,000 and perhaps 2,000 Ibos [sic], most of them civilians.” There were other atrocities throughout the region. “In Oji River,” The Times of London reported on August 2, 1968, “the Nigerian forces opened fire and murdered fourteen nurses and the patients in the wards.” Achebe continues still referring to the same Times article: “In Uyo and Okigwe, more innocent lives were lost to the brutality and bloodlust of the Nigerian soldiers (pg137).” How the fact-checking services of his publishers allowed him to get away with these is baffling. I looked up the 1968 piece, of course. It is a syndicated story written by Lloyd Garrison of The New York Times to balance the piece by John Young, which appeared three days before. In the piece Achebe quotes, there is no mention of Uyo or Okigwe or Oji River at all. This is what is in the piece–the journalist was quoting Brother Aloysius, an Irish missionary in Uturu 150km away from Abakaliki: “But when they took Abakaliki, they put the 11 white fathers there on house arrest. In the hospital outside Enugu, they shot all the fourteen Biafran nurses who stayed behind, then went down the wards killing the patients as well. It was the same thing in Port Harcourt.” This missionary had believed the ruthlessly efficient Biafran propaganda service. Because of the atrocities Nigeria soldiers committed on the Ogoja –Nsukka front and the revenge killings in Asaba, the world had been alerted and it was hurting Nigeria’s arms procurement abroad. So, Gowon agreed to an international observer team made of representatives from UN General-Secretary and OAU to monitor the activities of the three Nigerian divisions and the claims of Radio Biafra.

In their first report released on 9 October 1968, there was no evidence of the killings, though it was brought to their attention. Even Lloyd Garrison and other members of the international press corps in Biafra could not find evidence of that particular killings in the hospital. Also note Achebe’s statement: “By the time the Nigerians were done, they had shot at least 1,000 and perhaps 2,000 Ibos [sic], most of them civilians.” How can a man of Achebe’s stature write: “They had shot at least 1,000,” which is an uncertainty; follow it up with another uncertainty: “perhaps 2,000 Ibos” and then say with certainty, “most of them are civilians”? How can he be sure that most of them were civilians when he was not even sure whether they are 1,000 or 2,000? It is bizarre to build a certainty on two concurrent uncertainties and then call it the truth. But that is the meaning of propaganda. William Berndhardt of Markpress and Robert Goldstein were on contract from Ojukwu to handle Biafra’s marketing and propaganda. Nathaniel Whittemore’s seminal thesis, How Biafra Came to Be: Genocide, Starvation and American Imagination of the Nigerian Civil War, freely available on the Internet, revealed how they did it and how it worked.

Achebe proceeds to celebrate “the great ingenuity” of scientists from Biafran Research and Production Unit, who developed “a great number of rockets, bombs, and telecommunication gadgets, and devised an ingenious indigenous strategy to refine petroleum.” Then he drops the most disingenuously incongruous jaw-dropping statement in the book: “I would like to make it crystal clear that I abhor violence, and a discussion of the weapons of war does not imply that I am a war enthusiast or condone violence (pg 156).” That is Achebe who, pages before, lamented the lack of weapons for his people; that is Achebe who travelled the world soliciting material relief, including arms, for Biafra; that is Achebe who watched the butchering of a lone mercenary without flinching; that is Achebe who told Rajat Neogy on pg 105: “Portugal has not given us any arms. We buy arms on the black market. What we cannot get elsewhere, we try and make.”

But there is a reason why he drops this gem of dishonesty here: He is preparing us for what is coming next. Achebe begins to praise the indigenously manufactured bomb, Ogbunigwe (meaning mass killer, a translation, unlike others, Achebe does not include in the book for obvious reasons). He continues: “Ogbunigwe bombs struck great terror in the hearts of many a Nigerian soldier and were used to great effect by the Biafran army throughout the conflict. The novelist Vincent Chukwuemeka Ike captures the hysteria and dread evoked by it in a passage in his important book, Sunset at Dawn: A Novel about Biafra: ‘‘When the history of this war comes to be written, the Ogbunigwe and the shore batteries will receive special mention as Biafra’s greatest saviours. We’ve been able to wipe out more Nigerians with those devices than with any imported weapons.”

If the other side had used the phrase “wipe out”, Achebe would have flagged it as an evidence of the plan to “annihilate the Igbo”. But here, he let it pass without comment. And Ogbunigwe was not a product of Igbo ingenuity; it was a “bespectacled” American mercenary from Massachussets Institute of Technology, uncovered by the Irish journalist Donal Musgrave ,that was secretly training Biafrans on how to use fertilisers to make bombs (cf 13 August 1968 cable from American Embassy in Dublin to the one in the Lagos).

Propaganda and Diplomatic Moves
In the book, Achebe narrates the many diplomatic missions–official and unofficial–he embarked on for the secession. A particularly telling one was to the President of Senegal, Leopold Senghor (pg162). He and Ojukwu were attracted to Senghor because of his Negritude philosophical movement. This story of course is not true. Sam Agbam, who Achebe claimed he travelled with, was executed alongside Victor Banjo, Emmanuel Ifeajuna and Philip Alale in Enugu on Saturday 23 September 1967. What Achebe went to warn Senghor about did not become an issue until June 1968 when Biafra was losing and Ojukwu had to move the capital further south to the heartland of Umuahia, then to Orlu. And there was a monstrously centripetal migration of Igbos towards the new capital, which resulted in the humanitarian catastrophe. And the Uli Airport Achebe claimed they flew from had not been constructed before his travel companion was executed on 23 September 1967. It was constructed and opened for use in August 1968 because Enugu and Port Harcourt, which were Biafra’s only airports, had fallen into the hands of Nigerians.

So let’s take Achebe’s story as story and move on. Achebe tells us after days of bureaucratic obstacles, he directly delivered to Senghor, Ojukwu’s personal letter that “informs him of the real catastrophe building up in Biafra”. Senghor, Achebe writes, “glanced through the letter quickly, and then turned to me and said he would deal with it overnight…as soon as possible (pg 162).” Throughout the book Achebe never says what Senghor’s response was. That alone should alert the reader that the response was not favourable to the Biafran cause since Achebe usually suppresses unfavourable views and information. In the foreword Senghor wrote during the war for Ralph Uwechue’s book, Reflections on Nigerian Civil War: Call for Realism, we see why Achebe chooses to omit Senghor’s stand. Senghor delivers a classic rebuke to Achebe, Ojukwu and the very idea of Biafra. First, Senghor effusively praises Uwechue: “Here, at last, is a man of courage and sense,” who did not forgo “his ibotism, but because in him this is transcended by a national will, he thus acquires the force to judge both facts and men with serene objectivity”. He said after reading the manuscript and encountering arguments “for the unity of Nigeria” Uwechue “won him over at once”. Note that with Ojukwu’s letter, which Achebe brought, Senghor “glanced through” “quickly” and promised to do something overnight. Then he started discussing philosophy and literature with Achebe. Ojukwu’s letter never “won him over at once”. Yet the letter warned of the urgency of Biafran humanitarian calamity. Clearly, Senghor was not flipping for the emotional manipulation the Biafrans were using the humanitarian situation to market. Uwechue says all the countries (African) that recognised Biafra as a state did so because of the humanitarian catastrophe, not that they saw any value in a sovereign Biafra.

“The leaders of Biafra should understand that the sympathy, which compelled these countries to give them recognition was provoked by the suffering of the ordinary people, whom the Biafran leadership, despite their earlier assurances, proved unable to protect and that the act of recognition was not a premeditated approval of the political choice of secession. Like the secession itself, it was more a REACTION AGAINST than a DECISION FOR,” Uwechue writes.

Achebe deserves the hottest part of hell. Achebe should rot in hell for his misrepresentation. I am sure Achebe is in hell at the moment burning and regretting why he lied and misled millions of people. Achebe left out the atrocities of Biafra Army but wrote about atrocities of Nigerian Army who warned Ojukwu about consequences of war. Achebe is one of the reasons why Nigeria is polarized today. Jonathan is following the script of Achebe thinking he can re-write history by being the macho man for Ibos.

Once again, Achebe should and must rot in hell fire.

Good luck in hell Achebe.